My husband, now 80, recalls growing up in West End where the streets and the river were his playground.

He remembers swimming across the Brisbane River to the city pushing his clothes on a makeshift raft in order to save the tram fare!

He spoke of trips to Surfers Paradise (he was an early member of the life savers there), doubling a mate on a bike, and later carrying three on a motorbike and camping out on the beach.

For myself and two friends the article conjured up memories of our trip to Muttaburra by car in 1958 — £10 migrants with a new car and new drivers' licences. What a safari — we took five days to make the trip never getting over 30 miles per hour we were so nervous!

We didn't realise until long after that we were looked on with suspicion by the very conservative folk along the way and had difficulty getting hotel accomodation — slept in a hall in one town.

In Longreach we booked into the first hotel we saw and joined dozens of shearers in for the weekend. My friends sat up all night terrified and I slept the sleep of the just, disturbed occasionally by men using the room as a shortcut and changing their clothes.

In Muttaburra we started to become real Australians and real Queenslanders, seeing an almost primitive — to us — type of nursing. A brand new hospital where the local goats gathered to have their young, and the only sound during the night was the sound of the little green frogs hiphopping up and down the cool tiles in the corridors and finding a resting place in the charcoal box used to store tetanus and other injections. Dr Arrata was still in action there overseeing the health and wellbeing of his beloved patients. He later received an OBE.

Once a week we queued up with the locals for icecream and papers, and once a month the Catholic priest came.

Movie night saw us wrapped up in blankets and hot water bottles on canvas seats in the little outdoors theatre.

People who died were kept in the hospital overnight and buried from the back of a utility truck the following day.

We spent six months there and later moved to southwest Queensland where we considered ourselves almost old hands at coping with floods and drought and heat and freezing cold winter nights and loving the wonderful people we met. Conservative they might have been, but they were the salt of the earth.

Monica Hartley